Within minutes When Donald Trump announced in the early hours of Saturday morning that U.S. troops had captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, disinformation about the operation flooded social media.
Some people shared old videos on social media platforms, falsely claiming to show attacks on the Venezuelan capital, Caracas. On TikTok, Instagram and X, people shared AI-generated photos and videos purporting to show U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents and various law enforcement personnel arresting Maduro.
In recent years, major global events have sparked massive disinformation on social media as tech companies have rolled back efforts to moderate their platforms. Many accounts have tried to take advantage of these loose rules to enhance engagement and gain followers.
“The United States of America successfully conducted a large-scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who was captured and deported from the country along with his wife,” Trump wrote on Truth Social post in the early hours of Saturday morning.
Hours later, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that Maduro and his wife had been indicted in the Southern District of Recent York and charged with narcotics-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.
“They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts” – Bondi he wrote on X
Within minutes of news of Maduro’s arrest, a photo showing two DEA agents surrounding the Venezuelan president spread widely on multiple platforms.
However, using SynthID, a technology developed by Google DeepMind that is designed to identify artificial intelligence-generated images, WIRED was able to confirm that it was likely a phony.
“My analysis indicates that most or all of this image was generated or edited using Google’s artificial intelligence,” Google’s Gemini chatbot wrote after analyzing the image shared online. “I detected a SynthID watermark, which is an invisible digital signal embedded by Google AI tools during the creation or editing process. This technology is designed to remain detectable even when images are modified, such as by cropping or compressing.” First there was the false image reported by fact checker David Puente.
Although X’s AI chatbot, Grok, also confirmed that the photo was phony when asked by several X users, it falsely claimed that it was an altered version of the 2017 arrest of Mexican drug kingpin Dámaso López Núñez.